Change Happens

At GSEI, Leslie Crutchfield keeps her finger on the pulse of how and why social changes occur, or do not, in the 21st century.

November 16, 2018

By Bob Woods
Photo by Drake Sorey

Throughout history, social movements have risen and fallen, resulting in either enduring change or short-lived surges. The Renaissance altered the course of culture and learning worldwide. Conversely, about a century ago, America’s temperance movement faded after little more than a decade of Prohibition.

She oversees a GSEI team whose work falls into three buckets: academics, research, and external partnerships. The latter includes corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Indeed, the fellowship she was awarded while writing How Change Happens was funded by Bank of America, GSEI’s founding partner.

Crutchfield’s book dissects significant social changes that have occurred during the 21st century, although the movements behind them stretch back to the 1990s. “My research looked at how those movements came together to accomplish changes,” she says.

The book dovetails with Crutchfield’s ongoing work at GSEI, as well as her previous studies focusing on the vital role the corporate world plays in fostering change. Her prime examples include the sharp decline in smoking, the Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage, and the expansion of gun rights.

Influence of Grassroots

Beyond the corporate influence in each of those cases, Crutchfield identifies six other practices of successful movements (see “Roots of Change,” below). Topping the list are grassroots efforts. “Movements need to build from that level and not just from grass tops,” she says.

There is no better illustration in the book than the gun rights movement, especially when contrasted against gun control activism. Gun owners started rallying around the Second Amendment in the 1990s, and since then, laws favoring gun ownership and rights have proliferated. By 2012, the NRA’s membership had risen to nearly 5 million. The largest gun control group at that point, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, claimed around 400,000 members.

That disparity was magnified when, in reaction to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that same year, a majority of Americans and many in Congress demanded tougher gun control laws. Yet once legislation in the Senate finally came up for a vote in 2013, it was defeated.

The tables may be starting to turn, Crutchfield notes, a shift that further demonstrates grassroots influence. The spark was Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, formed the day after Sandy Hook, and Everytown for Gun Safety, founded in 2014.

“By 2017, Everytown had approximately 4 million members,” she says. After the mass murder last February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that number topped 5 million. “This is the first time in modern history that the gun control movement is operating with equal, grassroots velocity and volume to the gun rights movement,” she says.

Though proposed changes in federal gun laws have still not passed, there is a chance things could be different after Parkland and the Never Again student-led organization it spawned, Crutchfield says. That is one of the ongoing social movements she’s now researching, along with #MeToo, the grassroots movement founded in 2006 that burst into the mainstream after sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein were made public.

“Sexual harassment is already illegal,” she says, “but cultural attitudes have not caught up.” So whereas strengthening those laws may not necessarily change behaviors, perhaps the public outrage fueling the #MeToo movement will.